My first brush with the Kwanzan cherry was a pair of ancient trees near the condo in Boston. I would walk beneath them, coming home on late spring evenings back when I worked in retail and had not a care in the world. I didn’t pay much attention to them, other than a passing glance, mostly because they carried no discernible fragrance. At the time, I wanted everything – beauty and fragrance and ease of cultivation, and anything that lacked one or any of the aforementioned traits got nary a notice. Yeah, I was that bastard.
The beauty of the Kwanzan eluded me until my first spring with Andy at his old house in Guilderland. Off the wooden deck was a glorious cherry tree, alight with blooms on sunny spring days. It was a perfect posing spot, one that I used for work included in The Talented Trickster Tour: Reflections of a Floating World. That floating world was echoed in the falling petals of the Kwanzan cherry tree. The beauty was transient, making is all the more cherished.
This year the Kwanzan in our backyard is putting on a spectacular show. Andy thinks it’s one of the best and I would agree. We posed under it for an anniversary photo (come back in a couple days for that post). One of the benefits of the cool spring weather lasting a little longer means that the floral show gets extended too. We’ve had years where our blooms have lasted only a couple of days, wilted beneath a brutal sun or ripped off in a windstorm. Expecting similar catastrophic results in this crazy year, I’ve been making the most of the show while it lasts, taking frequent breaks to walk outside beneath its beauty and soaking in the prettiness as much as possible.
